Reviewed by Penny Webb

CATHERINE Truman's delightful conceits include a weathered animal bone carved to look as if gathered on an invisible thread across its middle. And she keeps you guessing as to which of her objects are brooches and which not jewellery at all.

For many years, this leading Australian craftswoman researched cultural variations in 18th and 19th century anatomical models. She then became a keen observer of the ways in which anatomy is taught in medical school. Her focus had a context. Having experienced repetitive strain injury and addressed it by a greater understanding of bodily movement, Truman is inspired by the experience of embodiment rather than the look of the body.

But why make brooches, which of all jewellery are most removed from the body, being attached to clothing? I don't yet have an answer, but as I weigh in my hand a puzzling lime-wood brooch, painted black, embedded with glass beads, I think how light it would be to wear. But what also comes to mind is the image of a very stylish woman in black to whom I'd just been introduced and something of her directness and vibrancy attach to this object.

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That's the thing: once you set up correspondence between shapes, textures and felt experience, as you are encouraged to do in this show about contexts, there is no certainty about the facts of the matter.

Truman's works appeal to sight, but how a thing looks always involves a sense of its tactility, its weight, and, if kinetic, of the sounds it might make, the thrust of its potential movement, even its smell in some cases. All these considerations are relevant here, plus the objects' histories: their genesis and place in the natural world.

Les Murray is a master of such faceted representations. The following part-description from Mollusc, one of his ''translations from the natural world'', is rich with multiple sense impressions: ''… by its inner sexes, by the crystalline/ pimpling of its skirts, by the sucked on/ lifelong kiss of its toppling motion''. The many molluscs in this show include three snail shells in the ''froth'' group of objects. Finely pierced and hollowed out globes of white styrene have been attached to these carapaces. This juxtaposition of materials suggests the inevitable signs of pollution encountered at any waterway or shoreline, but not much about the creatures.

Truman's method of thinking with her hands is exemplified in a grouping of spiral, cone and funnel forms made of paper, card, wood, fabric, glass, plastic and shell. Among the objects is a skilfully carved wooden facsimile. In preserving the look of a piece of rolled-up brown paper, Truman's virtuoso carving contextualises her work as a process of discovery.

But there is nothing unresolved about Truman's colours. Beaches have been an obvious source of materials and may have also inspired the palette of chalky whites, acid yellow, soft red and black used so successfully on wooden brooches and on the intriguing draped-shell carvings in the window installation of this huge show.

Finally, if the glass-bead droplets on the patinated bronze of rain twigs verge on kitsch, this indulgence in surface effects is more than made up for by the inexplicable smoking bones in which a plastic stalk subtly embedded in a eucalyptus twig should have you coming to your senses with a jolt.